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Forum rules
This forum is meant for general questions about the usability of OJS from an everyday user's perspective: journal managers, authors, and editors are welcome to post questions here, as are librarians and other support staff. We welcome general questions about the role of OJS and how the workflow works, as well as specific function- or user-related questions.

What to do if you have general, workflow or usability questions about OJS:

1. Read the documentation. We've written documentation to cover from OJS basics to system administration and code development, and we encourage you to read it.

2. take a look at the tutorials. We will continue to add tutorials covering OJS basics as time goes on.

3. Post a question. Questions are always welcome here, but if it's a technical question you should probably post to the OJS Technical Support subforum; if you have a development question, try the OJS Development subforum.

We are giving some of our journals the opportunity to get some info on downloads and abstract views on their published articles.

However, when looking closer at the report (from 'View Report') there is something strange about the figures. Articles, where you do not have the opportunity to view the abstract, have positive counts - but it is not possible to view abstracts that are not there, so there should be no positive counts here.

Can anyone explain why this is. It seems strange and odd to present the figures to our journals, when something is wrong.

Can anybody describe how views on the Views Report are calculated? I just shared the report with the editor, and I wanted to see if we can confidently use the numbers in this report to promote our journal.

One tip: Whenever I had an updated galley version, I used to delete the galley version and upload the new one. This reset the galley view count to 0. Now I realize I can edit the galley version and upload the new file there. That doesn't reset the galley view count.

In the View report, the abstract view counts are retrieved from the published_articles table -> views column in the database, while the HTML and PDF counts are retrieved from the article_galleys table -> views column in the database. The view counts update whenever anyone views the abstract page, or the galley page, depending. These counts should be generally reliable, with the exception of the following bugs:

Bug 6946 is fairly unique to a single use case, and shouldn't inflate numbers too highly. Bug 6835 is perhaps a bit more troublesome, and needs further testing, but that relates to the abstract view counts and I'm assuming the fulltext counts are perhaps more important. Please feel free to CC yourself to those reports for future updates; and if you have any other specific questions, let us know.

Hi Claus,

Can you give me a bit more detail on how your journal is set up, for example which version of OJS you are using; whether you have checked off "Do not require abstracts" for that particular journal section (from Journal Management -> Journal Sections); and if possible, the URL to your journal and one of the problem articles?

We got the same problem James. We created a local system report for our OJS that will extract data from the article_galley table to identify/show the number of downloads per article per journal. But upon comparing all the total number of downloads per month generated by the Counter Statistics plugin figures per journal has a bit lesser number of downloads rather than the report that we've extracted. Please confirm that the cause of this problem is the same as the thread starter's post.

Regarding articles without abstracts that have abstract counts: all articles do have a landing page, which will include the abstract if one is available (and in which case will be linked to from the article's title in the ToC). This landing page is still available if there isn't an abstract to be read -- it's used for example as a landing page by Google Scholar and other indexing services, as it's the only page that uniquely identifies the article itself, but also provides links to all galley filetypes.

So that's one reason why you might be seeing some discrepancies, and abstract counts where abstracts shouldn't technically be counted. If there is a consensus as to whether this should be considered an abstract view count or not, I'd be happy to file a bug report.

Additionally, WRT comparing with COUNTER stats: COUNTER counts things a little differently -- most important, the protocol specifies certain situations where view counts shouldn't be recorded (such as more than x views per second). I don't recall the rules offhand, but if you'd like more info either check out the COUNTER website or let me know.